OK, I'm going to read a feminist poem called "History
of Punctuation on the Face."
Most of this poem I'm going to-- there's
a couple of sections I'll go over.
The punctuation in the poem is all out to the sides.
So you'll get why.
"History of Punctuation on the Face."
We love punctuation.
We love it on our faces
Between our eyes,
the commas on pages,
Slashes and virgules by the noses
the deeper ones called smile lines.
The history of punctuation on our faces,
the not-smooth-now, colonized landforms.
Try agelessskinrevolution.com, an internet pop-up
says between news.
Botox could fix your punctuation,
And we don't want service worker bacteria injected in our skin.
Some of our sisters said, naming wrinkles after the dryer years.
The history of punctuation in the West.
Men were reading silently.
Women didn't read, of course.
They were accompanied by the lyre and the strings.
Construction workers do not whistle any more because
of punctuation on my faces.
When I think of the invention of signs,
when we think of interpunct,
the small, plump dot made reading easier,
we welcome extra punctuation over time.
Women sat up high in the arena,
no signs for when the gladiators killed,
and on the wrinkled earth, the animal.
The interpunct kept pace,
and thus, the scribes began their sense of interpacing.
At what level did experience begin?
Thus began the sense of interfacing.
At what degree do Botox creatures
stretch marks designed to make reading easier?
Weakness happens when the muscles fall.
They invented the dipple and the period.
At the Grand Canyon, we saw wrinkles up and down
from the Precambrian.
What's so bad about granite wrinkles?
What's so bad about punctuated women?
The parenthesis was added later.
Grief Botox may cause side effects.
We didn't accept a corporate account of our skin.
We do accept the long Precambrian,
the feldspar in the West, the punctuation in the texts.
Monks placed marks in surviving manuscripts
Mostly not coming from the author.
Aurelius noted he had inserted marks.
Others appeared in the fourth century
Not hopeless, only adding pauses,
Metamorphic commas on the faces.
Marks had been inserted to show forces
The dimple with one dot of traces,
The asterisk appeared medievally,
The punctus exclamatibus, and by then, human surprise
had been invented.
Experience on our faces,
And once when we were hiking down into the Precambrian,
Granitic structures, huge Vishnu complex,
we had extra experience,
A reader suddenly allowed to put the marks on,
The printer made the right to put emotions in,
when he left her
Punctuation deepened.
Only some languages develop commas.
Some faces, some agreements have,
And time makes other lines within the sense of sense.
He started leaving her when she grew Precambrian
around the eyes.
He was very going to leave her.
Then he did.
Another started naming wrinkles after time,
She named them Valley of the M, heartbreak, budget, protest,
app.
When you see an older woman on the street,
a reading of her beauty starts.
No stretching skin, smile lines built like the Precambrian.
Older ground becomes so rich and rare.
After Botox, she couldn't whistle well.
Zoroasters, granite, igneous extrusions.
The corporation needs our shameful self.
In her divorce, the wrinkles deepened.
Individual wrinkles named for lovers.
Young and older riding added time to it
The commas of pure pleasure.
After great pain, the Precambrian.
Some sense in the experiment grew,
The pattern of pure pleasure grew.
The measure of text is not predeath.
What is your favorite form of punctuation?
My favorite form is the almost pause,
To have some extra time around the dream.
Not dream of youth, poor Botox, creatures
chained into our friend.
Oh, semicolon, why hatred of old women, not of earth?
Why no hatred of old canyons?
Why no hatred of the valley?
Why hatred of the women doing nails and women
eating, teaching, nursing babies, walking, talking,
bent like commas?
Why do the aging women apologize till they barely even talk?
I asked the semicolon, and it said,
don't be ashamed of your skin.
I asked the comma.
It said, don't be ashamed of your eyes.
I asked the virgule, the parentheses, the dash,
the tilde, the umlaut, the macron.
They said, don't be ashamed, shame, shame.
I asked the ellipsis and the period, the exclamation,
and the question mark, to read the human woman's face.
And the sign said, take your time.
The pauses bent and heard, as did the quartzes
and the cracked feldspar faces of the canyons.
There are marks and runnels and rivulets, scratches of exile,
skins, age, capacities.
Oh quartz, ah granite, basalt, lava, faces
Stay with you.
They remember you.
They make signs with laughter.
All old women, we remember you.
Remember the wrinkles under cities.
The faces ours, full of pain, dots and lines and whines.
Faces loved in suffering and gladness over all the earth.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.